How important is disambiguation with a really common last name?
I have a very unusual last name - so much so that, even though my first name is relatively common, I am the ONLY person with my name in the world... at least according to Google and Facebook searches. (This is actually true of both my parents, too, even though my mom has the 5th most common first name for her generation.) This is sometimes great, but also sometimes very inconvenient, as it's very easy to find out almost anything about me online. This has sometimes been a negative in dating, employment, and just general privacy, I've found... I only imagine this will get worse as more and more info goes online. I'm just lucky that something like Facebook didn't exist when I was really young and stupid. With my name, I'd never get away from it. I kept my maiden name because I liked it and the originality of it, but as I am getting older and the internet trail just keeps getting longer, I've been thinking about taking my husband's name solely to make myself unsearchable.
My husband, on the other hand, has a very common last name - the world's most common last name, actually, Li - and a pretty common first name. There are literally thousands and thousands of people with his name, which makes it nearly impossible to find him online and completely protects his privacy. On the other hand, he knows several people with his exact same name, first and last... so much so that for awhile, among his group of friends, he was known as "medium" [name], to distinguish him from "little" [name] and "big" [name]. He has never minded this at all.
We are trying to name our daughter, who will have my unusual last name as a middle name and my husband's common last name. Most of the first names I've suggested are relatively common - Vivian, Caroline, Margaret, Elena, Magdalena. Another poster suggested I should pick the most unusual (Magdalena) for the sake of disambiguation. Now, aside from the fact that I don't think it's that easy to disambiguate when you have the world's most common last name, I'm not sure that in a digital world that it's really that wise to do so. (Having my last name as a middle name won't differentiate too much, I think, because middle names are rarely used. But she would almost certainly be the only person on earth with that full name, even if we chose a first name like Sophia.)
What do you think? How important do you think it is to try and disambiguate our daughter? Or is a certain amount of anonymity really a gift?
Tue, 08/07/2012 - 1:09am
Replies
My name's John Baker. I greatly enjoy the anonymity my name offers. Combine it with an "unlikely" middle name, and your daughter can use the middle name to remove ambiguity whenever desired.
Interesting question...
My sister recently did background searches on a nanny.
She had a relatively common name-Emily Anderson or something similar.
At the last moment, my sister remembered her less common middle name, did the search over, and found some less than savory things.
I guess I'd think your daughter has the best of both worlds, in that she has the anonymity (sp?) afforded by a common last name, with a distinctive mn if she wants to be...well...distinctive!
I would simply choose the name you love the very best.
I'll also add, that of all the names you listed, I wouldn't call any of them too common among babies. I don't know when I've met a wee Margaret, and that one has oodles of nns besides!
I've got a 7 month old Margaret refusing to sleep a few feet from me right now. :)
That said, my first-last name combo is common enough to hide me a bit online; my middle name added to it finds only me. I like it that way!
I was going to post about my dh's very common name, but Linneaus seems to have beaten me to it! :)
I agree that a less common middle is nice in case someone wants to be found (my dh's middle is also very common). Our kids have common firsts combined with less common middles, just in case they ever want them.
An interesting question! I have to say in doing research on my family tree, I much prefer more unusual names. I was once contacted by a woman whose ancestor was named Marie Weber, born in 1910 in MN. (I also had an ancestor by that name, born in 1910 in the same town in MN.) Turns out they were two differnt Marie Webers, not related to each other at all (that I know of). This particular concern (tracking/researching ancestors) will perhaps lessen over time as well with the increase in online information -- in the case of Marie, I could simply have located her facebook page and found out who her husband and, perhaps, several other relatives were to fit her in the appropriate spot on my family tree...
The unusual name definitely made genealogy easier for my family, that's true, except (of course) there were some common names in there as well that are not easy to research. But Koreans don't have this issue, even though there's not much last name diversity, because the family clans have been keeping genealogical records since the founding of each clan. My husband (the future head of his clan) will inhereit an encyclopedia-sized set of books called the clan register that lists every single male clan member, going back to 800 A.D., when his clan was founded by a Chinese emperor who fled to Korea when his brother staged a coup. (The women are partially listed... just their last name and clan origin, but modern women have their full names included.) There's a professional organization in Korea that keeps the registers up to date and reissues them every generation to the clan head--this is actually why we need a Korean name for our daughter as well, because that's how she'll be listed in the register.
I'm not sure you can know today what privacy issues your daughter will face 15 (?) years from now -- and I wouldn't want to name my child based on concerns for her privacy. From the names you say you are considering, I like Magdalena best -- as a name -- not just because it is less common than the others. I also like "just" Magdalene, which is even more uncommon (i.e., less trendy).
But Magdalene to me sounds more like Madeleine, therefore MORE trendy-sounding. I'd say Magdalena is all around more distinctive.
-Dorit, still not logged in for some unknown reason!
While a certain anonimity is a gift, you don't want your daughter ever being confused with any unsavory types in the future. Perhaps you could consider hyphenating your last name with your husband's last name rather than giving your last name to her as her middle name. That way she would really have a unique last name until she marries and decides for herself what last name she will carry throughout adulthood. Then any first name you give her can be as common as you like.
I don't think you should pick a name solely based on what you perceive will be internet privacy. As the Guest poster said, you have no idea what privacy issues your daughter will face. Plus, while I have a very uncommon last name and not so common first name, a google search brings up very little even though I am on facebook (you can set it so you don't come up in any search).
The best thing to do is choose the name you like best, then when your child is old enough to use the internet, teach her about internet privacy.
That said, of your list Magdalena is the name I like least. I like Vivian and Caroline best.
I don't think you should pick a name solely based on what you perceive will be internet privacy. As the Guest poster said, you have no idea what privacy issues your daughter will face. Plus, while I have a very uncommon last name and not so common first name, a google search brings up very little even though I am on facebook (you can set it so you don't come up in any search).
The best thing to do is choose the name you like best, then when your child is old enough to use the internet, teach her about internet privacy.
That said, of your list Magdalena is the name I like least. I like Vivian and Caroline best.
This is a tough question. I do recognize the advantages of being anonymous on the Internet, but at the same time, I have this reflexive aversion to generic-sounding names... perhaps because, like you, I am the only person I can find with my birth name (at least using Google—I suppose there could be someone else out there who hasn't left any Internet trail). Honestly, being easy to find hasn't caused any problems for me thus far. When I Google myself, I find an old black-and-white photo from my high school newspaper of me singing a solo in the school musical; a photo from my college newspaper that was mistakenly attributed to me (I only spent one day taking photos for the newspaper and that wasn't one of mine, so I don't know how they managed to put my name on it); my wedding announcement; my dad's obituary; some rosters from a choir I sang in for a year after college; and a whole bunch of those sketchy sites that publish publicly available information on individuals, all of them with out-of-date or mixed-up information. My Facebook page is hidden from public searches. Obviously, there are some things that will get out there because of organizations that you join, especially if some of them are media or performance-based, but I feel that most of that stuff is pretty harmless, and the stuff that isn't is usually within your power to control (e.g., I wouldn't have put my wedding announcement in the newspaper if I didn't want it out there).
With things like social media sites like Facebook, I've discovered that Google can list your comments and likes on other people's pages, depending on what they've set their privacy settings to... so in many ways, it doesn't really matter much what you've set your own privacy settings to. (I've set mine very carefully!) It's made me cautious about commenting on friends' statuses, and especially about commenting on, say, a newspaper story or whatever, especially now that many newspapers are using Facebook for comments, rather than allowing you to create your own anonymous login. I never say anything that I'm not willing to stand behind, but I just don't like how much info is out there. There is just no reason for, say, an employer to know that I liked a particular politician to follow their updates or to see the pictures of my baby shower that a friend, with lower privacy settings, posted on her page. (Even if I untag myself so it doesn't show up in my feed, my name is still on the photo and searchable.)
Privacy issues will only get more vexing, I think, not less.
Maybe I'm just lucky and have lots of friends with high privacy settings, but the only thing that comes up in searches is my work site, and my name is very uncommon.
I actually think that privacy is going to increase over time as people become more aware about how their info is used.
Choose the name you like best.
That's why I rarely even comment on people's Facebook pages, and when I do the content is totally benign ("Happy birthday!", "Congratulations, beautiful baby!" "Aw, I'm so sad that restaurant is closing"). I mainly use Facebook to keep track of other people, and strictly limit the content that I contribute. I suppose I'm lucky in that most of the people who might be posting photos of me have reasonable privacy settings as well. I also am very careful about logging out of the site when I'm done using it, because of the newspaper commenting issues—it does seem like it's way too easy to accidentally comment under your real name, when you meant to stay anonymous.
Don't be too sure that common names give anonymity. My name is extremely common, but once you know a little about me (very little, e.g., the kind of place I work, or the region of the country where I live, or anything about my interests) google finds me pretty easily. It didn't always do so, but it does now. Besides, who knows what technologies will demolish our privacy in the future?
I would concentrate on giving your daughter a name you like, without regard to anonymity or disambiguation. The options you list all sound lovely to me.
Anonymity is one side of the coin, and is generally desirable, I think, but the other side is confusion, to be avoided if possible.
I keep hearing about people who get harassed at the airport because they share their name with someone on the TSA's no-fly list; there was one particularly memorable story where the person being stopped was a child -- he was so obviously not the person they wanted that it wasn't even funny, but the TSA as a whole is pretty dumb. There are also multiple stories out there of people jailed because they had the wrong name. These sorts of reports make me kinda glad that I'm the only one in this country with my given + surname (and probably in the world if you include my maiden-now-middle name).
That said, there's only so much you can do: one of the "wrong name" examples is a woman in Atlanta named Teresa Culpepper. That's not exactly what I think of as a common name.
All in all, I think the best advice is to choose an uncommon middle name (which it sounds like you have), and don't worry too much about popularity for the rest of the name.
I think with a very common last name, a less common first name is helpful for daily life. It doesn't have to be Ynxslia or something equally crazy, just not so common that she is known as Isabella L. or Isabella, you know, the blonde one. It also helps avoid identity confusion as others have mentioned. No one wants to be mistaken for a criminal that has the same name. However, the flip side is that as you've mentioned, some anonymity is helpful in our current day and age, which why I personally think the name sweet spot is around the 200s in the popularity lists. Most of those names are common enough that if were to google them with a common last name, you'll find lots results, but if you were to use that name in daily life you wouldn't often common across another person with the same name.
I have a very common first name and maiden name. You can't really find anything about me on google. If you use my unusual married surname you still can't find much about me (although there is someone with my exact name). I keep my privacy settings pretty high on most internet sites and/or don't use my real name. This won't protect privacy totally but even with a common name it is possible to fly under the radar to a certain extent.
My daughter has an unusual first name, middle name and surname. I would be extremely surprised if anyone in the world shared the exact combo. When we named her we really only considered unusual names, mostly because they are the names we like. Honestly, privacy or searchability weren't factors in our decision. It's hard to know what will be a problem in 20 years time regarding security. I personally found sharing my name with 5 other people in every class at school more irritating than being searchable is. I guess it's a personal choice though. I even now find it weird that I can google my name and find all these other people that share it. I feel like it should be my name and not anyone elses.
I have this exact siituation. I use my married surname which is very common, not quite Smith but up there. Even though Miriam has been hovering around 300 for decades there are plenty of Miriams with my surname. My maiden name is relatively uncommon but not unheard of, so there are quite a few Miriams with my maiden name. My nickname Mimi combined with either my maiden name or my married name still turns up a goodly number of people. But the name I always used professionally--Miriam Maiden name Married name is unique to me. Now my son has a common first name Edward, and he insists on going by Ed personally and professionally. So together with our super common last name, there are a ton of people with his name. But since he is self-employed as an author, he doesn't want to be anonymous--he wants to be at the top of the page of Google results. Now he is well established in his field, so his name is prominent on Google, especially when combined with his field of endeavor. But at first it took some maneuvering to get his name up there. So the possibility exists that your daughter may not want to be anonymous, particularly in her professional life. Going by present circumstances, I would choose common first name and unusual middle name, allowing for a good bit of flexibility as to privacy versus prominence. But since we can't know future circumstances (there was no internet when I named my son), choose the name according to what you like best, and let her work out these other issues as she pleases when she reaches adulthood.
Chalk me up as another person with an unusual last name. I have always been the only person with my name, and thus I'm easily findable online. If you can figure out how to spell my name, which is not easy ;)
anyway, it's never bothered me annd I've never had anything creepy or strange come up because of it. In fact, I had more negative feelings about my first name being too common when I was growing up, and being one of several in my class with the same first name. Which is why I changed my first name when I was in my early twenties.
all this to say, I think you should just choose the name you love and not worry about who else may or may not share it.